


Juno Steel and the Crush That Wouldn't Die

by onetiredboy



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Benten was a shit about it, But mostly regretting it, Gen, HCPD days, Juno & Mick, Juno Steel Tries, Juno Steel is a hopeless romantic, Juno being kind of soft for once, Mick being dumbass, Sad Juno Steel, Set a year after Ben's death, Young adult Juno Steel, and I hereby declare that he had a crush on all his childhood friends at one point, but also Mick being a good friend, juno being snarky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-11-08 03:33:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20828711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onetiredboy/pseuds/onetiredboy
Summary: In which Detective Steel lives through the ultimate humiliation: confessing to a childhood crush.





	Juno Steel and the Crush That Wouldn't Die

I hated to admit it. It filled me with a special kind of anger, having to try and make room for the words bouncing around my brain. My mind was wrestling to decide whether it was ironically endearing or cruelly funny that today of all days had to be the one. As difficult as it was to accept, though, there was no denying the words were there, lurking behind the barriers of what I should’ve been thinking instead. No, there was no getting around it.

It was a nice day.

Unnaturally nice, I mean. And not day anymore, the sun set hours ago, but… It’s not often that you get weather that nice in Hyperion City, especially not in Old Town with its leaky protection from freak weather events. Statistically speaking, you were more likely to get caught in a natural disaster in Old Town than watch the sunset gleam off the windows of buildings, throwing light in a shade of orange-pink invented especially by that particular sun onto the world before it was soaked up and gone. Poetically speaking, today should’ve been pouring with rain in the unique Martian flavour of radiation poisoning, pollution, and grief, soaking into minds and washing bad memories up on the shore. And yet… it had been a nice day.

It was just like me to ruin it.

I slammed the door shut behind me, watching for a second as the rotting wood of the doorframe decided whether or not it was going to fall apart. After it had decided to hold it together, I turned and let my gym bag fall off of my shoulder. “Thanks for letting me stay, Mick.”

Mick opened the cupboard doors he was standing in front of and pulled two glasses out, as well as a bottle of something that looked suitably capable of long-term organ damage, “Aw, it’s nothing, Jay. This is just like the sleepovers we used to have when we were thirteen, remember?”

“Which ones? The ones where I hid you in my room while your Uncle was being threatened by debt collectors, or the ones where you hid me in your room while Mom had a death warrant with my name on it?”

“I was thinking more the ones when I saved up my money to buy matching North Star pyjamas and we watched Andromeda movies all night.”

“Funny, I don’t seem to remember those. Mom must’ve beat them out of me.”

Mick shook his head as he slouched back over to the couch I’d sat myself on and put the glasses down, pouring us both a drink. His long dreadlocks spilled over his shoulder and almost fell into one of the glasses. I remembered when he’d cut them himself when we were kids, when he’d grinned that big gap-toothed smile at me and spun around to show me the mess he’d made. Benzaiten had been there too, and the jokes he’d made— well, he was always funnier than me.

“This is your problem, Jay,” Mick was saying. I cut him off with a scoff, leaning back on his flea-filled couch.

“Just the one, Mick?”

“This is your _main _problem,” Mick corrected himself, holding a drink out to me. I took it gladly.

“Enlighten me. What’s my _main _problem, Mick Mercury?”

“You’re always focused on the bad things. Every memory we have, I mean— sometimes I wonder if we grew up in the same world, Jay,” Mick sat himself down on the couch beside me and downed his drink so fast that even I was a little impressed. He reached for the bottle again.

“That’s because the world you grew up in was fifty percent imaginary, Mercury.”

Mick shrugged and downed another glass, “I don’t know about that. I think you just… Look at things differently. I mean, look at Benny. You both grew up in exactly the same household, Jay, and look how he turned out!”

I laughed bitterly, “Yeah. Cause things turned out so much better for Benzaiten.”

Silence fell thick between us. You want to know why I hated that it was a good day so much? Why the colours in the sky that had been painted just for me made my mouth sting with the taste of bile? Because the reason I was here today at all, the reason I was back in a place I thought I never would be… Today was the day my brother was buried, one year ago.

Mick cleared his throat, “Jay, I’m sorry, I…”

“No, don’t worry about it, Mick. You might be right, after all,” I downed the rest of my drink and put my glass on the table, pouring myself a second one. “Maybe he’s the lucky one out of the two of us.”

“I…” Mick shook his head, “Jay, look… You know I don’t know what to say to that—”

“Then don’t say anything, Mick. I’m only wondering out loud.”

I tried to ignore the way Mick was looking at me as I downed my second glass. I didn’t want to ignore him, I just… wasn’t used to someone actually taking my jokes seriously. It filled me with something that I was scared was guilt. I’d only be guilty for jokes like that if I didn’t mean to make them. If I didn’t mean to make them then that meant that somewhere deep down I wanted to live. And that… sometimes that scared me more than dying did. I had fallen too far to make it to the top again. It was easier to forget that I knew how to climb.

“Jay…” Mick put his glass down on the table. “Answer me something.”

“Shoot, Mercury,” I leaned back in the couch and wondered idly if I could fall far enough into it to disappear.

“I know you're gonna be mad at me for asking—”

“That is a _great _way to lead up to a question, Mick—”

“Just listen, Juno.”

I raised my eyebrows. I was ‘Juno’ now, not Jay or Jayjay, so that meant business. I put my hands up and gestured to him to continue.

Mick put his hands together, and then pulled them apart again. He leaned back on the couch beside me and frowned those messy eyebrows over his warm-brown eyes, “I just want to know, Jay. I want to know… that I’m not in danger of losing you, too.”

I stared at him for a moment. Then I laughed dryly, “Wow. You know you’ve hit rock bottom when _Mick Mercury, _King of the Freeloaders, is wondering whether or not you’re suicidal.”

Mick sighed, “I knew you’d get like this—”

“No, really, Mick. There’s nothing more heartening than knowing your best friend is worried you’re going to off yourself on a whim.”

“I’m just _worried _about you, Jay.”

“Join the queue.”

Mick sighed and put his head in his hands. His skin was starting to get lines that were accelerated far beyond what you’d expect from someone twenty-one years old because of the time he spent under the Martian sun. His skin wasn’t smooth like it once was when we were kids, but… tired. Like the rest of him. Tired and dirty and stressed and.. getting old. Christ, we were still young, but we were all getting old fast.

For a moment we just sat in silence. Then Mick leaned forward and poured himself another drink, “You know, this day isn’t just about you, Jay. I know I like to joke around and keep things light. I don’t like things being all, y’know… _negative. _But Ben was my friend, too.”

I wasn’t as scared of seeing signs of age in myself — I avoided looking at myself in mirrors as much as possible and plus, I’d always felt secretly a hundred years old inside. But to see Mick Mercury, the boy who believed in glittering cities and in _the future_… seeing him get old, get tired, get… bogged down with it all. That was scary. If Mick Mercury didn’t have hope for a future… who did?

“I’m… sorry, Mick,” I mumbled. “And… for what it’s worth, I… I feel like I’m… safe, at the moment. I’m not going to do anything to myself. Though, my new secretary, Rita, gives me a very convincing case. God hopes you never meet her, Mick, I think that really would be the one thing to push me over the edge. One of these days, I’m going to fire her. I can’t see us ever getting along.”

“Aw, Jay, that’s just what you used to say about me!”

I got thumped hard on the back, and then the Mick I knew was back, all bright, gap-toothed smile and dreads with god-awful blond highlights around his shoulders. He pulled me in to his rank-smelling leather jacket, and for all the world, I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. I hugged him back, closing my eyes and trying for a moment to pretend we were thirteen again, at one of those sleepovers I couldn’t remember. One of the good ones.

Mick pulled back from me and thumped me hard again, “I’m glad to hear you’re doing okay, Jay. You must be so proud. Finally a cop at the HCPD. You’re gonna turn it around for kids like us on the streets of Old Town. You remember how it used to feel, being scared of the police?”

“Still am, Mick.”

“Yeah, me too.”

I laughed, “That’s because you’ve been in jail more times than you can count, Mick.”

“Okay, the last one wasn’t my fault. How was I supposed to know that eating pizza while driving isn’t legal?”

“It wasn’t the _pizza_, Mick, you crashed through a window.”

I saw the gears turn in Mick’s brain, and he frowned, “That doesn’t seem like reason enough to get arrested.”

“It wasn’t. You were arrested because the police already had a warrant out for you for breaking and entering the Denny’s. The Denny’s, Mick. Like… the antique one that’s meant to resemble Earth over 500 years ago, the one you need to book at least two years in advance to get a seat in.”

“I wanted to try a slam, Jay, and it was _right there_. Sure, it was two A.M and nobody was around, but I left a five-cred bill on the table. Is that against the law?”

I laughed, “I give up explaining. Point is, no amount of system reform is going to stop you from getting into trouble with the law, Mick.”

Mick conceded at that, and we spent the next hour the same way we had been spending them since we were ten years old. We drank. A lot. Not quite to the point where things started getting blurry and our dinners started revisiting the floors, but decently halfway there. Which is the point where I started ruining the day. No, believe it or not, it wasn’t the crankiness that did it — irritable had been my defining adjective since I was six years old and Mick was used to that by now. It wasn’t snapping back at his attempts to look out for me or laughing at his expense that made me cringe when I woke up the next morning. That honour went to the moment when I… uh. Tried… to kiss him.

I don’t know what I can say in my defence; that us pretending like we were eleven again got eleven-year-old me feelings stirring back up? That I was drunk and messed up from my battle with grief and guilt all day? That I was lonely, had been for a while, and was desperate? I don’t know if it was any of those things. It might have just been a Juno Steel-original fuck up moment.

It started when he asked the one question I had been hoping nobody of the old friends and family-adjacent adults I had had to interact with today would ask. Mick leaned closer on the couch and asked, “Jay, I’ve been meaning to ask you how things are with Diamond—”

“Uuugh,” I cut him off, and for a moment I wondered if I really had had too much to drink or if the sudden nausea wasn’t just anxiety. “We’re off again, Mick.”

He grimaced, “Again?”

“God knows how long for this time.”

Mick nodded slowly and shrugged a shoulder, “It probably won’t last. It never does. Plenty of relationships go through hard times—”

“Yeah, cause you would know.”

“Alright, Jay, that one’s a little low.”

“I—” I sighed. “Sorry, Mick. It’s just a lot to deal with. I-I-I know that relationships are meant to be—be a combined effort or… something but they’re just—sometimes I feel like they’re just _so _unreasonable. I mean, it's a year since my _brother _died, and _they _need to ‘take a break’?”

Mick nodded again, slower. Then he shrugged again, “Maybe you’re just… a little too similar?”

“Wow. Just what I needed to hear. That we’re _both _insensitive assholes.”

“Look, Jay, I don’t know what you expect me to say. I’m bad at advice when I’m _sober_.”

“Yeah, you’re not wrong.” I laid back against the couch and rolled my eyes. “I don’t know, Mick. I just… I miss how it used to feel when we were kids. Like… like one person could sweep you off your feet and you’d never have… secrets, or fights, or… not _understand _each other.”

“Well, I may not know much—”

“True—”

“_But_…” Mick put a hand on my shoulder, “Jayjay, if you want that kind of connection with someone… you’ve got to open up to them as well, you know? You can’t understand someone without them understanding you.”

I stared at Mick for a moment. The face of my best friend, the man who… who understood me better than anybody else on the planet. More than Diamond did, even… even maybe more than Sasha did. There wasn’t much that I would consider _good _about my life but… the bits that were all had one thing in common: a gap-toothed smile and warm brown skin and long, hideous (but beautiful in their own right) dreads.

“You’re right,” I murmured.

Mick smiled at me, patted my shoulder and then let his hand fall off of it, “I know, Jayjay. Now how’s about we get your bed set up—”

“Mick,” I stopped him when he tried to move away, my hand catching his wrist and easing his arm back down to his side. I didn’t know what I wanted at this point. I wanted comfort, and affection, and warmth. I wanted… a friend.

“Thank you,” I said. “For everything.”

“Jay, it’s fine. I mean, I haven’t seen you in, like, a year, you know? It’s time we started catching up for things outside of _sad _stuff.”

“I know,” I said. “Mick…”

“Yeah, Juno?”

The problem was, I’d never been taught how to make friends. Not really. I knew how to fall for every second stranger I met, and I knew how to make enemies something awful. Black and white, good and evil, love and hate. What I felt at that moment, that… warmth towards Mick, I… I hadn’t learned what it meant to me yet, how to behave when I felt it. And so… I leaned in.

The next thing I felt was Mick’s hand on my chest, holding me back. “Juno, buddy…” He sighed, and then leaned forward, pressing his warm forehead to mine. “I love you. I really do, but… not like that. And—And you don’t, either. Not really.”

“How do you know?”

Mick smiled softly, “Because, Jayjay. I understand you.”

I closed my eyes and fell against the couch. I let a long, long breath out of my nose.

“Plus,” Mick added into the silence between us, “I, uh… don’t know if you ever noticed, Jay, but. I… don’t really go in for… I mean. I mean, I know you’re not… I know you’re more a _lady _yourself, but my kind of ladies are more… uh. A little more…”

“Hey, Mick?”

“Yeah, buddy.”

“Drop it before you say something you regret.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a good idea.”

I shook my head slowly, and then laughed. “Christ. Look at me. You know, Mick, I never told anyone but Ben this, but when we were kids… God, it’s so embarrassing. I had the biggest crush on you for a while.”

Mick said nothing. After a moment, I looked up at him, wondering if that wasn’t the final straw in the Juno-Mick friendship. But he wasn’t looking at me scared or freaked out. He was… smiling.

“Yeah…? I… know?” Mick shrugged his shoulders, “I knew about that, Jay. I thought you knew I knew. Benny told me.”

I sat upright on the couch, _“_He_ what?!”_

“Well, he didn’t _tell _me outright at first, but… I heard the jokes he used to make, about you and me. I might be a little stupid but I’m not deaf. By the time he told me I… already kind of knew,” Mick shrugged again.

“Ben told you,” I muttered. I put my head in my hands, “Ben… told you…”

“We were, like, eleven years old, Jay. It’s not a big deal. I mean, everyone knew you had a crush on Sasha since you were, like, four, until she dumped you when you were six, and not even that’s a big deal, so two weeks’ worth of a crush on me isn’t anything, really.”

“I can’t believe him. So much for keeping your sibling’s secrets. God, Ben is such an asshole sometimes.”

I heard what I said a second after I said it, felt the anger and energy I’d built up in my stomach die away suddenly like a hand waving away steam. “Was,” I corrected myself quietly. “Was… an asshole sometimes.”

Mick gave me a sympathetic half-smile and patted my knee. I pulled my knees up to my chest on the couch and stared at nothing in particular until the voices in my head got too loud and I poured myself another drink.

Sometime after that – could’ve been ten minutes, could’ve been twenty – Mick and I got up and moved the coffee table with the empty bottle and the glasses to the side. His apartment was one of the cheapest on the market, more rotted wood than anything else, and basically one medium sized room with a bathroom behind a door to the left. His couch unfolded into the bed that I would be sleeping on, and I slipped into the blankets without even complaining about the three separate roaches I saw crawl out from under my pillow. I was tired. I had maxed out on the limit of emotions I could feel for one day and all I felt now was like cotton wool had been stuffed into my head. The alcohol was probably helping a little bit with that.

It took me about three minutes of looking around before I squinted at Mick, “Hey. Where are you sleeping?”

“I got my sleeping bag over here,” Mick kicked something I couldn’t quite see in the dark and it unrolled into a long sleeping bag.

“Right,” I said. I paused for a moment, hesitating in the dark. Then I nestled down into my blankets, “Goodnight, Mick.”

“Nigh-nighs, Jayjay.”

I spent a long moment in the dark, thinking. Mick’s apartment was in, objectively speaking, the _worst possible _place it could be, with cars rushing past every few minutes, their headlights sweeping the room. But then, that was a lot like Mick. Unable to sleep anywhere except for where there was plenty of noise and plenty of people. Sometimes I think the reason why Mick Mercury gets away with the fact he should be dead eight hundred times over by now is because the world just… likes him. Mick is… boisterous. Loud. Stupid. So _unbelievably _stupid. He can’t take a hint. He has a proclivity for saying all the wrong things. And you can’t help but love him from the moment you meet him. The closer he is, the more you feel like… like no matter what happens, everything is going to be alright.

I rolled over onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. “Mick.”

A sleepy sound emanated from the floor vaguely to my right. I heard the shuffling of his sleeping bag on the hard, rotting floor. “Yeah, Jay?”

The words were clunky in my throat. “You should… come share this bed with me. It’s big enough for two. You’re going to put a crick in your back if you sleep on the floor like that, and I don’t want you whining all the way through breakfast tomorrow.”

“Well! Now that you _ask_, Jay…”

I heard the rustling of the sleeping bag, and then I felt the metal of the sofa bed cry out as long-limbed, clumsy, too-tall Mick Mercury came barrelling onto the bed beside me.

“Just like the old times, ey Juno? You and me, snuggling together at the end of a long day.”

“Don’t get sentimental, Mercury, I just didn’t want you to miss out on the chance of getting a cockroach stuck in your ear while you sleep.”

He just laughed, and his big, warm arms curled around me in that bed and squeezed me close. He threw a leg over me, too, and I was reminded once again of my love-hate relationship with Mick Mercury hugs, ™. They threatened to crush the breath out of my lungs and guaranteed that I would wake up with eight different pains in places I didn’t even know I had the night before, but… they were good. Squeezed all the bad thoughts away, too.

“Goodnight, Jayjay. Love ya,” Mick muttered, and I smiled.

“Night, Mick. I… love you, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Concierge voice] If you enjoyed this tale, please consider leaving a Kudos or a comment below to let me know.


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